"The records are sketchy as to the nature of the experiment," Liz said. "Any information you can provide would be useful."
"I’ve tried for a long time to put Ronald and his pet project out of my mind. It was not a very pleasant experience."
Liz leaned forward. "What was so unpleasant about the experiment?"
"Not the experiment; Ronald Briggs. He was not a pleasant man."
"Oh." Liz relaxed, but her question obviously had struck a nerve, and Doreen's memories came flooding back.
"He was prematurely balding, he smelled, and he was very much full of himself. On top of that he showed an open disrespect for women. It may sound self-serving, but that had a lot to do with why he removed me from his team. He kept Ruthie around because he liked looking at her ass — excuse me for being so blunt."
Gant tried hard but he could not suppress a smile.
"Ruthie and I were research assistants, not well suited to his project, but I believe he enjoyed bossing women around. He would always refer to us as 'the girls'. I was in my thirties at that point, Ruth a little younger but still an intelligent researcher. He treated us like summer interns. He worried about our figures — not the math kind, either. Ronald was always telling us that we were putting on weight or something. Yet he was the one with the cupcakes and girlie magazines in his desk drawer."
Gant mumbled, "Briggs does not sound like the hero type."
"Hero? Why would he be a hero?"
Gant started to explain but Thunder spoke first: "He initialized containment protocols, locking himself in the Red Lab to confine whatever went wrong."
"No. He would have been the first to run for the exits."
Gant said, "Then whatever it was that killed Briggs and his researchers was bad enough that he reacted without considering the consequences. What was he up to?"
Dr. McCaul stood and paced across the small office. Her eyes absently wandered to a cluttered bulletin board full of various notes and reminders.
"How much do you know about quantum physics?"
Gant responded, "How much do you know about urban warfare tactics?"
She laughed. "Okay. We’ll go for the short version."
Thunder said, "From what I heard he was sifting through atoms looking for … well, I heard he was looking for ‘God.’"
McCaul’s eyes lit up. "Yes, that’s exactly right. Why did you need me again?"
Gant turned away from a shelf full of statuettes and collectibles he had been examining. He found himself smiling again. He could not help it; he liked her. She was not one of the coldhearted scientists he so often dealt with. He did wonder, however, how long it would be before Archangel came to this facility to handle some screwup or another.
He asked, "What does that mean,' looking for God'? I would think that would be a better subject for a Bible study group."
"There are many Bibles, all dealing with the truth behind existence. I have a personal interest in that, you see," she said, nodding toward the shelf of figurines and trinkets that had grabbed the major's attention.
"Quite a collection you have here," he said and held up a pendant featuring what appeared to be plaques with inscriptions written in Hebrew.
"That's a kabbalah pendant of the two tablets," McCaul explained.
He gently returned it to the shelf and pointed at a brass figure. "I recognize Buddha here." He then motioned toward a six-inch sculpture with a stone-like resin base holding an Arabic symbol that made him think of fire. "What about this?"
"That is the word Allah, depicted in a pure and cleansing flame."
Nearly a dozen more such collectibles lined the shelf, each a symbol from the world's most popular religions, ranging from Christian crosses to a collection of coins depicting the great masters of Sikhism.
Thunder pulled the conversation back on track by asking, "What did his experiment have to do with God?"
The older woman grinned a little and answered, "In all honesty, Dr. Briggs was not really looking for God; not in the generally accepted sense. No, he searched for the fundamental building blocks of creation. Of course, people of religion believe the universe was created by God, and therefore Briggs would mock that he was trying to find God himself, hidden in the subatomic world."
Gant said in a nearly mocking tone of his own, "I would imagine that a search for the Almighty would be focused out into infinity," and he pointed a finger at the sky in reference to the mysteries beyond the stars.
"You know, when we think about the infinite we always think in that fashion; about the universe up there in space. After all, the universe is so incredibly big that it is hard to comprehend. But science tells us there is a boundary, that our universe is like an expanding bubble, and sooner or later you will run out of space. For example, take this room." McCaul motioned to the four walls surrounding them. "If this is the universe and you go out far enough, you will hit a wall. Of course, getting out far enough is the trick. Science fiction aside, it is doubtful humanity will ever explore even a tiny fraction of the universe."
"Okay," Gant said in a light tone, "so the universe is big."
"But it has its boundaries," Liz added.
"If you want true infinity you need to go in the other direction," McCaul continued. "Like I said, if you travel far enough, sooner or later you will hit those walls. On the other hand, you can always cut something in half. You can always get smaller. No matter how many times I cut a strand of my hair in half, I can always take one of those parts and cut it in half once again. And so on. The truly infinite is not the big grand universe, it is the atoms that comprise everything in that universe."
Liz wrinkled her brow and said, "I thought there were limits. I thought there were pieces that couldn’t be cut up."
"I’ve been away from subatomic theory for a while, but every so often they say they’ve found the absolute-positive-end-of-the-line building block. Quarks, leptons, and the like. There was a time, dear, when the atom itself was considered indivisible."
Gant said, "And that sort of blew up in our face."
McCaul considered this for a moment, then laughed. "That’s very good. Very good, indeed. For a military man, you have a sense of humor. Dry, but it's there nonetheless."
Liz asked, "Was Briggs’s research military in nature?"
McCaul looked at Thunder and smiled in a manner that made Gant think of a mother smiling at a child who asked if babies come from a stork.
"Colonel, I think you and I both know that everything we do eventually has military applications. But to answer your question, no. Briggs’s work was purely scientific. The military handled security at Red Rock but was not directly involved in Ronald's big project."
"Which was?"
Dr. McCaul paused and rubbed her chin with two fingers.
"How best to explain …" she mumbled. "Do you know what the big bang is?"
"Well, that has to do with the creation of the universe, right?" Liz tried. "Some sort of explosion that started it all."
"To put it simply, the big bang is the moment the universe was born, conceivably beginning from a singularity that essentially exploded. This event led to the creation of the first atomic nuclei and then the first atoms, the root of every piece of matter in our universe."
Gant asked, "So how do we end up in an underground laboratory in Pennsylvania?"
However it was Liz who answered: "He was trying to find traces of those original atoms, wasn't he?"
"Very good. There was a book titled The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question by a Nobel Laureate named Leon Lederman. He first used the name 'the God Particle' in his book. I should mention that most scientists absolutely hate that name, by the way, and Lederman's book came out about a year after Briggs's experiment. In any case, what we're really talking about is the Higgs boson. That’s what Briggs was looking for."